Page 103 of All These Beautiful Strangers

Grace Calloway

June 2007

“Say ‘cheese’!”

The flash went off, and then Charlotte held the digital camera carefully, looking at the screen to see the picture she had just taken of her sister next to her in the backseat.

“Why do people say that—‘say cheese’?” Charlotte asked.

“Because it forces people to smile,” I said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. Next to me, in the driver’s seat, Alistair was talking into his Bluetooth headset. We had left the city in the early afternoon to beat the weekend traffic. It was officially summer now, and most people we knew were headed to the Hamptons, but we were headed north to our house on Langely Lake.

“Why do people always have to smile in photographs?” Charlotte asked.

I reached in my purse at my feet to grab my lip balm. “Because photographs are about capturing a moment so you can remember it, and when you look back at a picture, don’t you want to see yourself smiling and happy?” I asked.

“You look so dumb, Sera,” Charlotte said, reaching the camera across the seat so her sister could see it in her booster seat.

“Don’t call your sister dumb,” I said, glancing at Charlotte in the rearview mirror.

She looked like me. My mom had shown me pictures the other week of me at Charlotte’s age and it was uncanny, really, the resemblance. The same wavy dark brown hair, the wide-set gray eyes, the curve of our cheeks. She looked like me, but she was so much like Alistair. She was tough and headstrong and possessed a confidence and a composure that seemed otherworldly in someone so young.

Now, when I looked at my daughter in the backseat, I found myself wondering if there was any of my likeness in her character.

Seraphina reached out and grabbed the strap of the camera from Charlotte and then flung it hard against the side of the door.

“Hey,” Charlotte cried out. She reached over and grabbed the camera. “You’re such a brat.”

Charlotte fiddled with the camera for a moment and then looked up at me.

“She broke it,” she whined.

I turned around in my seat to take the camera from her so I could examine it. The body of the camera and the screen looked fine, but it would no longer turn on.

“I’ll have to take it in when we get back to the city and get it fixed,” I said.

“But what about my art project?” Charlotte asked. “I have to take pictures this weekend.”

Charlotte was taking a weeklong summer art class at her school.

“We might have an old camera at the house that you can use,” I said. “We’ll look when we get there.”

“Read me those numbers again,” Alistair said in the seat next to me. “Hold on.”

He tapped a button on his headset to mute himself. Then he glanced at me—the first time he had looked at me since we left the city. “Grace, can you keep things at a reasonable volume? This is an important call.”

He didn’t wait for my response before he looked back at the road and tapped his headset again.

“My apologies, Fred,” Alistair said. “I’ve got the girls in the car.”

He laughed at something Fred said that I couldn’t hear.

I rolled my eyes so that the girls couldn’t see and then smiled at them and pressed my index finger to my lips in a friendly “shhh” gesture.

Then I turned back around and sighed into my seat.

I glanced at my husband sitting next to me and I thought about how I missed the electric charge of attraction that came when you didn’t know every facet of a person. When you didn’t sleep next to them every night, or share a bathroom, or clean up after them when they were sick. I missed the mystery—the not knowing what comes next. That point when the other person seemed perfect because you only knew the best parts of them—the parts they wanted you to see.

That was terrible, wasn’t it? Though, I wondered sometimes if Alistair felt similarly. Surely sometimes he imagined I was someone else when we made love. I knew he looked at other women—long-necked women with perfect skin that they liked to show off in low-backed evening gowns at charity events. I saw him look at them, and I saw them look back. I tried to see my husband through their eyes. I knew, to them, he was handsome: tall, piercing blue eyes, a distinguished forehead crowned with salted blond hair. It was more than that, though—it was the way Alistair carried himself, as if he owned the room. As if he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. I’d look at my husband in these moments—the same man I lived my life next to every day—and for a glimmer of a moment, I’d actually see him. That was the thing. It’s not what you look at—it’s what you see. And when you’ve been with someone long enough, you stop really seeing each other.